There always is noise around Calipari, and don’t think for a moment he is blameless for that. He lives for the chaos in a way, which is why he accepted the position as Kentucky’s head basketball coach in the first place.

He would prefer it to be the chaos of his choosing, of his creation, though, such as the hyperventilation surrounding the mysterious “tweak” he introduced to the Wildcats as they prepared to enter the SEC Tournament a few weeks back — a tweak that he insists is a significant factor in their trip to the NCAA Tournament Midwest Region final Sunday.

This other stuff, the histories that are rewritten about his career almost on a weekly basis?

“It is what it is,” Calipari says. “Do you think it’s going to change?”

Well, here is what we can do. We can present some facts, and see if they register.

Not even a month ago, when Kentucky entered the SEC tourney having lost three of its last four regular-season games, there were position papers created suggesting that based on the current team’s struggles and the inability of the 2012-13 Wildcats to even make the NCAA Tournament that Calipari’s work with “one-and-done” players was a failed experiment and that the 2012 NCAA championship had been an aberration.

Calipari has been the coach at Kentucky for five seasons, though. This is the fourth time the Wildcats have reached the Elite Eight. They are 16-2 in NCAA Tournament games during his tenure. It would seem the aberration in that sequence is the season in which UK did not reach the tournament, and that the aberration — as in the case of this year’s Kansas squad, which lost in the round of 32 as star center Joel Embiid sat out with a back injury — was the product of the season-ending knee injury to the Wildcats’ best player, center Nerlens Noel.

Calipari knows, because it is not the first time he has encountered material attempting to contradict the facts of his record to advance a particular position. For instance, the common assertion that he is “just a recruiter.” It’s easy to get that idea given that his previous four UK teams included 10 players who spent just a single season in college basketball before leaving to become first-round selections in the NBA Draft.

However, to adopt or advocate this stance is to ignore the whole of his career. Indeed, his 1996 Final Four team at Massachusetts featured All-American Marcus Camby, and his 2008 Final Four team at Memphis was led by future NBA MVP Derrick Rose.

This is a rather episodic approach to examining history, though. Calipari’s first NCAA Tournament team, in 1992, was led by players named Jim McCoy, Will Herndon and Harper Williams. You only know Tony Barbee’s name because he later became the coach at UTEP and Auburn.

Herndon was a 6-3 power forward. Barbee was 6-6. Williams was 6-7. McCoy was a skinny shooter who went to high school about a mile from the Pitt campus. The Panthers did not recruit him. He scored 2,374 career points for the Minutemen, who defeated Syracuse in the round of 32 and pushed UK’s “Unforgettables” team hard in the Sweet 16. The Minutemen finished with 30 victories.

Just a recruiter?

This is where the twin dismissals of Calipari’s ability begin to consume each other. If success with even the most sparkling of the one-and-done players is an aberration but Calipari is advancing through NCAA Tournament games on a routine basis — well, wouldn’t that make him truly extraordinary?

“So now it’s, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that. It’s proven. It shows how hard …‘ Let me tell you: the 2012 year was a hard year to coach. So is this year,” Calipari says. “I want to know any coach that wants to say it’s an easy year. Ask all these guys that just got wiped out of the tournament: How hard is it? This stuff is hard.”

In Calipari’s college career, his teams have made 15 NCAA Tournament appearances. Of the 14 eliminations, only two have come against double-digit seeds. He’s never lost to a team seeded lower than 10th. Since 2004, when he was at Memphis, he has coached in nine tournaments. He has yet to lose to a seed lower than No. 3. The Wolverines are a 2 seed, so we can go ahead and declare it’s not happening this year, either.

A week ago, when All-Americans Jabari Parker of Duke and Andrew Wiggins of Kansas were eliminated from the tournament with only a single victory between them, there again was a chorus of suggestions that winning with players apparently committed to college for just a single season was a challenge not only for Kentucky, but for anyone.

And yet Calipari’s record with a series of such players is 150-36. He has won 80 percent of his games while having to reinvent the Wildcats’ schemes and re-teach basic and advanced offensive and defensive concepts on an annual basis. Add in the final four seasons at Memphis, starting in 2006, and his NCAA Tournament record over that period is 29-6.

This is the greatest coaching job of this era, not unlike Mike Krzyzewski’s best work from 1986-1994 and John Wooden’s from 1964-75. And like the others, it is a product of the particular era. So how come he’s not accorded the same sort of applause?

(And please don’t bring up the vacated Final Fours. Read Seth Davis’ biography, “Wooden: A Coach’s Life”, and you’ll forever be disabused of the notion that such justice is dispensed fairly.)

“For him to have the ability every year to adjust and change and reassemble the team is amazing,” UK assistant coach Orlando Antigua told Sporting News. “His ability to connect with people and be able to recruit as a result, that’s why people emphasize that so much.”

With this particular Kentucky team, along with schemes and strategies, the most significant challenge was to convince the players that functioning as a team and trusting each other on the court was non-negotiable, and that difficulty persisted nearly to the end of the season. The coaching staff began to believe it was conquering that beast when the Wildcats controlled No. 1 Florida for 30 minutes in mid-February before losing their grip on the game, but then came implosions at home against Arkansas and on the road at South Carolina. It seemed the Wildcats never would connect to each other.

“If you were on the outside, you might believe that,” Calipari says. “It’s in my mind that it’s going to happen, and it’s my job to see it’s moving in the right direction.

“Part of the problem was, everybody started fouling on every possession again. The physical play of the game, these young kids, we didn’t practice that way. So what I did, before the tournament: football practice. And we went 2½ hours of football practice. Well, you know me, my practices at the end of the year are an hour and 15 minutes. But we went three hours, 2½.

“I want you to be able to play against fouling. And if (referees) are letting it all go, then we’ll foul, and we’ll foul each other. Which wasn’t happening during those three weeks. So then all of a sudden my team stinks. They’re 18 and they’re not ready to get the stuff beat out of them.”

This is not the “tweak” Calipari has said he implemented three weeks ago. He won’t reveal it, even in confidence. This is UK’s secret, whatever it is.

“And now I’m mad at myself for not doing it two months ago,” Calipari says. “But let me say this: They may not have accepted it two months ago. They may have said no, they weren’t ready to surrender and lose themselves into the team.”

The Wildcats have found themselves at last. They’ve got their coach to thank for that. They will be among the few to bother.